Book Lecture: The Last Supper by Paul Elie

The Hank Center welcomed National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Paul Elie to discuss his new book, The Last Supper, a vibrant study of how a diverse coterie of artists engaged in the "early skirmishes in the culture wars" that profoundly informed and described life in the U.S. in the 1980s. In his explorations--ranging from Leonard Cohen's Pslamist grade "Hallelujah" to Andy Warhol's adapting Leonardo’s The Last Supper in response to the AIDS pandemic to Martin Scorsese's provocative cinematic rendering of Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation of Christ, Elie traces the beginning of our age of postsecularism, in which the religious imagination—and religious affiliation--is both surging and in decline. In Elie's new book, the creators (not the politicians) are the protagonists, and the work they make speaks to conflicts that have only escalated since the consequential days of the long 1980s.